A show reel is the motion picture equivalent of an artist's portfolio. It is typically used as a tool to promote an artist's skill, talent and experience in a selected field, such as acting, directing, cinematography, editing, special effects, animation, video games or another graphic-related field. It is conventional in the film industry to have one, and it is the main tool by which an artist promotes her or his own work.

In this episode of our inspiration series, we present 20 examples of beautiful motions pieces: stop-motion, experiments, show reels, demos, paintings and more.

Motion Pieces

London (harder, better, faster, stronger) Stop-motion: more than 3000 pictures, all put together in less than 2 minutes.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope “Vote For Hope” was written to encourage and inspire the hip-hop generation, and everyone else, to get involved and contribute their time, energy and creativity.

World War - 3D Animation World War was created by Vincent Chai for his final degree project while studying 3-D Animation at the University Of Hertfordshire.

Love Story A short love story in stop-motion.

Fireplays A fireworks show for the 4th of July. Music by MGMT.

Scintillation An experimental film made up of over 35,000 photographs. It is an innovative mix of stop-motion and live projection mapping techniques.

Minilogue - Animals Animation and character design by Kristofer Ström.

Khoda More than 6,000 paintings were painstakingly produced over 2 years to create this 5-minute film that meets the creator’s high standards.

History of the Internet An animated documentary explaining inventions ranging from time sharing to file sharing, from ARPANET to Internet.

Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection Commissioned by the advertising agency Nordpol+Hamburg to tell the story of the Japanese sports brand ASICS.

Mykonos Stop-motion music video for Fleet Foxes.

Revamped Graphic Equalizer Independent stop-frame animation project.

L’homme 100 têtes Dynamic portrayal of “1001 faces” is a mosaic of portraits and emotions that plays off of the power of faces seen close up.

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy San Francisco-based VJ. Dark area and VJing.

Galactic Mail Galactic Mail is a project made with Jonathan Vuillemin. It was produced by The Mill in 2008.

Smith and Nephew A spot by PSYOP. Directed by Eben Mears and Mate Steinforth.

MTV ‘Organic’ Idents MTV commissioned Umeric to direct 12 channel Idents and print materials for the rebranding of MTV Australia.

Mark Coleran - Screen Show Reel Show reel of screen design work for Mark Coleran’s various films over the last 9 years.

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn.

Last Click

Redesign in Motion Don’t miss this HD motion piece: a presentation by Mattrunks about the new version of Fubiz.net. Music by College (Moulinex Remix).

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